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Re: What Linux distro do you prefer and why?

Ubuntu and Mint (Cinnamon and XFCE) currently. Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 with gnome classic installed for my server and my work machine. Home machines have the two Mint 17 installs. My windows box only gets used for HTPC and gaming duties now.

I loved Suse 9 back in the day! But after a while, it seemed like Ubuntu just ate their lunch. Still fun for some server stuff but I couldn't use it for development after ubuntu figured out packaging dev tools.

Re: What Linux distro do you prefer and why?

I chose openSUSE because I wanted something with a default KDE user environment. When using other distro's (Fedora, Kubuntu, Debian) I find KDE is like an add-on that is not as well supported.

openSUSE is easy to install, I've had no problems with drivers on a few systems I'm running. I've had no problem using it to dual-boot with Windows 7 on my gaming rig. It runs Steam just fine and a number of games work with few problems (All the Valve stuff like Half-Life 2 and Portal 2, Borderlands 2, Serious Sam 3, Kerbal Space Program, Civilization 5, a metric ton of Humble Bundle games, UT2004).

In the past I ran Gentoo for years, but finally decided it just required too much upkeep. I checked out Ubuntu, but I didn't like how they rarely send their modifications upstream, and I really don't like how they are spinning off away from the rest of the Linux community with their own Unity interface and Mir display server.

Re: What Linux distro do you prefer and why?

Re: What Linux distro do you prefer and why?

Xubuntu 14.04 here in 4 systems. Fast and really stable. I recommend it for newbies or people willing to focus on getting things done.

I admire Arch Linux a lot, it is a distro for advanced users as it requires the user knowing very well what to do. I will be spending more time there soon. Also it is a Rolling Release distro, which I like a lot.

Re: What Linux distro do you prefer and why?

Ubuntu Mate has quickly become my favorite distro. It's so darn clean and purdy! It's also how I remember Linux when I first tinkered with it back in 2004. I loved Gnome 2 and Mate is just as nice.

I might try Linux Mint with Mate one of these days, but I'm kinda leary of swapping Linux distros as I've had some serious bad luck with my soundcard... the notorious Creative Labs ca0132 Sound Blaster Recon 3D PCI-E... I'm never buying another Sound Blaster soundcard again... works great in Windows, but the Linux drivers is a hack-job ported from a Chromebook... so yeah, in the future? I'm either gonna stick with onboard sound or a USB DAC.

Also, Ubuntu has a new PPA which is supposed to bring the latest NVIDIA drivers to it as soon as possible... hopefully in a more stable state than xorg-edgers which tends to have stability issues for me.

Honorary mention for Manjaro Linux Distro. It's Arch made easier. There's so many good DE's ported to it too and tends to run pretty good... but sadly ever since 64bit Kernel 3.16? I can't get that damn ca0132 Creative Labs Sound Blaster Recon 3D PCI-E card to work after boot with some basic terminal commands automatically... it's ridiculously annoying... so I gave up on any Arch-based distro.

Re: What Linux distro do you prefer and why?

Heyyo,

These days? Ubuntu Mate. I freaking love Mate/Gnome2 so much! It's how I first experienced Linux and enjoyed that interface. I can't say the same for Gnome3 though, I didn't exactly like that layout. I always found the lack of a proper taskbar that shows all the apps running to be really annoying and then trying to find work-arounds to get a proper one to be annoying that I just got fed up and switched to Mate and been happy ever since.

Drivers install easily and there's good PPA's for updating the drivers more frequently than the stock way if I want, same with Kernel and the Ubuntu Software Centre makes life easier... I'm a little sad that Ubuntu Software Centre is going the way of Ubuntu One but if that business model isn't working? I understand.

Honorary mention? Manjaro Linux. It's Arch Linux made easier. Lots of great desktop environments with it too. I love it a lot... but I've had kernel and driver updates cause it to fail and then have to use terminal commands to try and revert drivers... that or wait a few days or a week for someone to upload a newer version of the driver that is compatible with the latest kernel and such... Meh, it's damn fun to tinker with at times... but ever since kernel 3.16? I can't fix my ca0132 sound card (Sound Blaster Recon3D) for the life of me during boot... I made my own scripts and everything to mimic Ubuntu's rc.local file and it seems to load the script too early and it fails to use the 64bit kernel firmware loader (32bit doesn't suffer this issue at all btw) and then I have no sound until I manually run those commands via terminal... so darn annoying... that's why I stick with Ubuntu as my primary.

Re: What Linux distro do you prefer and why?

Ubuntu 14.04 with Cinnamon on my work machine
Mint 17.1 with Cinnamon *on 2 machines
Ubuntu 12.04 with gnome fallback on my work from home machine
and a testing unit with Xubuntu 14.04 (used for testing hardware and machines that people bring me to recover files from when they install viruses on their windows boxen)

I had a Ubuntu Mate install and it was pretty slick but my gpu on that one was just a little too slow to handle it.

Re: What Linux distro do you prefer and why?

Run Ubuntu 14.04 + Mate on DIY systems: both vintage AMD965 and newer XEON 1240. Tested other options for the workstation; SCILINUX (RedHat) was clean & granite solid, but (last year) would not run Chrome browser. So both systems run UBUNTU without issue.